I recently came across a cloud computing benefit/risk study conducted in the first half of 2011 by the IT Policy Compliance Group (ITPCG). It shows that best-performing organizations (which see higher profits and suffer fewer business disruptions and less data loss) use cloud computing significantly more than poor-performing organizations.

More than two-thirds of best performers use cloud computing — about half opting for private clouds, while 25% use hybrid clouds and another 25% use public clouds. By contrast, only 9% of worst performers use cloud computing.

Just when you were getting used to the idea of Web 2.0, along comes Web 3.0, which, according to a recent Booz & Co. report, “will offer an entirely new level of connectivity, communications, and information on customers.”

Search engines will be smarter, recommendation engines will know more about users’ habits and preferences, social media will continue to flower, and new kinds of services will make it all easy to manage. Booz calls this “the Transcendent Web” and notes it has four key elements:Continue reading →

A good service-level agreement looks simple — but that’s because it’s been conscientiously negotiated to meet the buyer’s needs. Of the five essential SLA elements that every managed and cloud services customer should focus on, I’ve described two — specifying service functionality and describing the infrastructure and standards to be maintained by the provider.

Essential SLA Elements #3 concerns SLA changes. Your SLA should include a mechanism by which you can regularly tune it in response to changing business conditions or new technologies. You’ll benefit from building in a formal review of your SLA (at least annually) in order to use experience and new information to revise it.

I see five essential elements that you absolutely need to pay attention to in your managed and cloud services SLAs. I’ll review each of them in my blog, starting with: Specifying each service to be provided.

This may seem obvious, and, in fact, it is. Yet too many service-level agreements are surprising vague about what exactly you’re buying.

This Wednesday — October 12 — I’ll be participating in the Small Business Technology Tour that’s coming to Salt Lake City, UT, where I’ll be talking about how cloud computing can boost small business productivity and help keep your operations secure.

I’ll be joined by a couple of other experts, and together we’ll talk about the benefits of cloud computing for small businesses: why and how cloud computing can reduce your capital expenditures, help you spend less on IT operations, provide you access to the deep resources and skills of a reliable cloud services provider, and improve your IT security, privacy, and availability.

It’s a 21st-century truth that even small businesses need complex information technology infrastructures to thrive. Which is why so many enterprises, both large and small, depend on the expertise of independent providers of managed and cloud services.

But using managed and cloud services can be risky, too. How reliable is the service? Where’s your data? And what about security?

Cloud Computing has been defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

How secure are the data, applications, systems, and networks your business depends on? If you’re like too many of the executives I talk to, you may believe all is well — but only because you haven’t asked the right questions.

One executive told me recently, “We’re cool; we haven’t had to touch our firewalls in three years.”

As more and more of your employees use mobile devices, these machines may start out behind your firewall — but they don’t stay there. They move around, to other networks with different firewall rules. Or no firewall at all.

When that mobile device returns to its trusted place behind your firewall, it may carry a cyber-infection that can attack your network from the inside.

The great firewall challenge lies in balancing the tradeoffs between degree of protection, usability, and cost. That balancing act starts with understanding what your firewall actually does.